The Justice Department is asking a federal court to drop the contempt-of-Congress case against Steve Bannon and erase his conviction "in the interests of justice," and Bannon's lawyers are not opposing the request, NPR reported.
The Biden-era Justice Department had treated the case as straightforward. Bannon refused to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, flouting a subpoena and declining to appear for an interview. A Washington, D.C., jury convicted him in less than three hours, and a federal appeals court upheld the verdict. Four years later, Deputy Associate Attorney General Michael Weisbuch wrote that it was not appropriate to continue the case because Bannon said he believed he was protected by executive privilege, and that the judge lacked authority to reject an unopposed motion to dismiss. The Justice Department did not respond to NPR's request for comment; Bannon's lawyers did not return messages.
Legal experts said the request fits a pattern in which the department has moved to wipe the slate clean for allies of President Trump while no one is left to defend the cases. "No adversity remains in this serious and high-profile criminal matter between, on the one hand, the U.S. Department of Justice overtly acting at the behest of the president of the United States, and on the other hand, Bannon, the defendant, who is a close political ally and adviser to the same president," said Bruce Searby, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Washington.
Pardons, 'interests of justice,' and a friend of the court
Searby said he first noticed the pattern in April, when the department asked to vacate the convictions of about a dozen leaders and deputies of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Those seditious-conspiracy trials had lasted months. Trump pardoned the vast majority of Jan. 6 defendants on his first day back in office, calling them "patriots," and later told 60 Minutes, "I don't think any group's been treated more unfairly than them, and to this day, when they see me they cry." For more senior defendants, the administration instead asked judges to drop cases in "the interests of justice," the same phrase now used in the Bannon filing.
Lawyers for Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who served on the Jan. 6 committee, had urged an appeals court last spring to appoint a friend of the court to defend those convictions, citing earlier appointments in the cases of Michael Flynn and Eric Adams. Judges ultimately dismissed the Jan. 6 charges without appointing an amicus. "Today's epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle," U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote. The Bannon request is now before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who presided over Bannon's 2022 trial. Searby said the judge should not accept the department's rationale "at face value," and that an outside lawyer could test whether the dismissal is an abuse of prosecutorial discretion.